On June 8, the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming welcomed twenty-seven participants to the third year of the Amgen-UROP Scholars Program, a summer initiative that places undergraduates on faculty-mentored research projects in the biological and biotech areas. Twelve of this year’s participants currently attend MIT. The remaining fifteen students were recruited from colleges and universities across the country, including the University of Wyoming, Oberlin College, Syracuse University, University of Maryland Baltimore, and Tougaloo College.

Members of the Terrascope freshman learning community have returned from a week-long trip to southern Arizona, during which they were able to see firsthand many of the factors contributing to a crisis in the availability of fresh water that threatens much of the Southwest. The returning students, having deepened their knowledge of the human and technological factors underlying the crisis, show a renewed commitment to informing the public about the seriousness of the situation, and also a stronger understanding of the influences that have made it difficult to take action thus far.

The findings from Rae Simpson’s Young Adult Development Project are available at http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/. Rae is the Program Director of Parenting Education and Research at MIT’s Center for Work, Family and Personal Life and was a member of DUE’s Holistic Theme team.

In June 2008, the UAAP kicked off year two of its Amgen- UROP Scholars Program. Introduced in 2007 and funded by the Amgen Foundation, the Program recruits undergraduates interested in science and biotechnology, and places them in MIT laboratories to conduct summer research with MIT faculty. Thirteen of this year’s Scholars were MIT students, while fifteen were recruited from universities around the country, including Duke, Winston- Salem State, Cornell, Texas Tech, University of Hawaii, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In total, almost four hundred applications from interested students were received, more than twice the amount received for the 2007 program.

This month, close to 60 participants from over twenty countries took part in the second annual International Development Design Summit (IDDS) at MIT. The conference was once again headed by MacArthur ‘genius’ grant winner Amy Smith and was supported by a team of over twenty organizers and mentors who selected from previous IDDS participants. Amy spoke at the final presentations about the huge diversity of the group and highlighted that they were “students and teachers, professors and pastors, economists and engineers, masons and mechanics, doctors, welders, farmers and community organizers”. The central idea behind bringing such a huge variety of people together is that of co-creation, as Amy put it, “the concept that it is better to provide communities with the skills and tools they need
to create technologies, rather than just giving them the technologies themselves”.

For Terrascopers, the Spring Break trip to Iceland served as a culmination of the work Terrascope students did in the fall, as a source of inspiration for their spring projects [as seen in the previous article] and as a community-building experience, bringing together the freshmen, upper-class and graduate students, faculty members and staff.

It is no surprise that MIT students seem to continually look for ways to take knowledge developed on campus and use it to make positive differences in foreign cultures and environments. As educators, we know that overseas learning opportunities significantly enhance the overall academic and social development of students, and we are committed to providing a broad selection of these opportunities to MIT undergraduates. Recognizing that UROP research has long played a key role in learning at MIT, it is clear that the Institute’s intensified focus on global learning should fully include cultivation and support of international research opportunities.

Under the guidance of Professors Dava Newman and Jeff Hoffman, Daniel Sheehan of OEIT worked with graduate students Lasse Linqvist (Aero Astro), Joe Essenburg (Mechanical Engineering) and postdoctoral fellow James Waldie to produce a GIS interface to the Java based Path Planner software that was previously developed at MIT. This software calculates metabolic costs and travel time for astronauts' Extra-vehicular Activity (EVA) on the moon and on Mars.